12 Ways CRMs Can Help Companies Achieve Customer Intimacy

How do you use your CRM to get closer with your customers? 

To help you use your CRM to get closer with your customers, we asked business leaders and marketing experts this question for their best tips. From optimizing user experience to prioritizing top customers, there are several ways you can utilize your CRM to get closer with your customers.

Here are twelve ways to use your CRM to get closer with your customers.

Optimize User Experience

Analyzing data and seeing how our customers interact with our site is so important. We constantly meet with our marketing agency to review stats like average time on page, soft to hard conversion rates, and everything in between to determine whether we are giving them the most optimal user experience from browsing out vehicles to the check-out process. It is this extra mile that we go that makes all the difference with our customers. — Randall Smalley, Cruise America

Track Key Metrics 

We have added more than 20,000 customers to our CRM since our founding in 2010. CRMs are great tools and can be utilized to identify your best customers. For our business, tracking metrics like repeat orders and total orders placed through a CRM provides insight into valuable customer segments like those needing to be CJIS or HIPPA compliant. Take the time to filter and analyze data through a CRM. Otherwise, it’s just an acronym for your business.  — Ben Walker, Transcription Outsourcing, LLC

Send Handwritten Notes Through Salesforce 

Our company integrates the sending of handwritten notes with Salesforce. We’ve seen some of the world’s leading sales organizations leverage their CRM to just click a button and send off personalized, handwritten notes to contacts, accounts, opportunities, and leads. The CRM of a company represents opportunity. Find an integration that supports your CRM and helps you realize the potential of all the customer data you have available.  — David Wachs, Handwrytten

Read and Respond to Reviews 

CRMs are a virtual goldmine! They are full of data, reviews, and opportunities to improve your business. I think the best way to get closer with your customers is to read and engage with your reviews — both good and bad. Bad reviews are just opportunities in disguise the way I see it. You are getting authentic feedback about how you can improve your product and overall customer experience and ensure the next time they come back, they are satisfied. — Vanessa Molica, The Lash Professional

It Helps You Speak the Language of Your Customer

With more than 20M faxes sent from over 20,000 companies, our business needs a CRM to keep our customer communications as simple as our faxing solution. The main thing for us is segmenting our CRM and communications by industry. Our medical and healthcare companies care about HIPAA compliance, while our finance clients tune in around GLBA compliance. CRMs allow you to speak the language of what a customer truly cares about.  — Eli Patashnik, iFax

Landing Page Tracking to Gauge Interests

We’ve been using Hubspot for the last couple of years, and one of the features that we love so much about it is the ability to track how they find us and what landing pages are most appealing to them. Lately, we’ve been mulling over the possibility of expanding our warehousing network to a few new markets, and we set up landing pages and conversion tracking for each of them. Not only is it really helpful for us to gauge interest in these new markets, but it also illuminates how important it is to our customers to be where they want to be. — Jake Rheude, Red Stag Fulfillment

Reminders to Stay in Touch

In life, it is nearly impossible to develop a meaningful relationship in a single conversation. A CRM can help a company get closer to customers by providing reminders to stay in touch. Specifically, a CRM can give you a nudge to call or email a customer every few months to find out how they are doing. In particular, this follow-up process is critical to discover customer service problems before your customer leaves you in frustration. — Bruce Harpham, Technology Marketing Consultant

Prioritize Top Customers

CRM data allows us to map out our customer’s journey showing us when and how our customers first interacted with our business, how their engagement phase went, and their post-purchase involvement. We can expand on our marketing strengths and maximize cost-effectiveness through this valuable information. In doing so, we can then prioritize top customers and strengthen our automated systems by better personalizing the experience. The CRM data allows us to target areas where we have seen prior success fostering better customer relationships in the future. — Katie Lyon, Allegiance Flag Supply

Finding the Right Time to Reach Out

CRM software helps us identify loyal customers so that we can offer our VIP shoppers discounts in the future and incentivize past customers to shop again. Through this data, we can personalize our communication via email automation. It allows us to monitor the frequency of their interaction as well and alerts us when it is best to act to keep them coming back. By using a CRM as a unified source to personalize customer behavior, track interaction, and engage with inactive customers, we’ve enhanced our ability for retention through automation on a more comprehensive scale. — Dan Potter, CRAFTD

Balancing Between Automation and Human Touch

Utilizing a well-crafted, individualized, automated email through your CRM increases customer engagement. It is easy to forget about customers who have not done business with you for some time, but it is vital to stay engaged with them and maintain that relationship. Use your CRM to make sure that this doesn’t happen. We implemented this strategy over a year ago. It was coupled with a referral program and we have seen growth month after month ever since. The trick is in the email. They absolutely must be personally crafted for each customer. It has to feel human or it will be disregarded as just another marketing email. Use the replies from customers who do not presently need your services as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship. — Keesjan Engelen, Titoma

Aligning Company Communications With Customer

To make your customers wildly successful, and then get closer to them, you need to keep them in mind in everything you do. This includes inter-company communication. When you combine your systems for registration and communication with your systems for engagement, there is one customer record and everyone in your company is on the same page. You can bill your customer directly from your CRM, so your finance, sales, and customer success teams are all on the same page and your customer isn’t being bombarded from many different angles. When all of your customer information and history are in one central place, your teams are happier, more efficient, and can get closer to your customers. — Oliver Andrews, OA Design Services

Direct Mail + Paid Social Ads

I’ve done over a hundred Mailchimp audits for small businesses and have seen how companies can leverage CRM integrations to achieve customer intimacy. Email automation is a practical example of a CRM integration, where a customer event triggers an email sequence that can help educate customers or inspire them to take action. Beyond email, there’s a myriad of ways that CRMs enable companies to stay close with their customers, ranging from postcards to paid advertisements on social media platforms. The key is obtaining data and integrating the CRM with a marketing platform. From there, customers can surprise customers with direct mail or a custom offer on a social news feed.  — Brett Farmiloe, Markitors

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Small Business Computing Staff
Small Business Computing Staff
Small Business Computing addresses the technology needs of small businesses, which are defined as businesses with fewer than 500 employees and/or less than $7 million in annual sales.

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